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About 2,000 Justice Department alumni who served at least nine presidential administrations of both parties — dating back to Lyndon B. Johnson — have called for Attorney General William Barr to resign in an open letter circulating online.
Chief among the concerns expressed in the letter is Barr’s move last week to overrule DOJ prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations in the case against President Donald Trump’s longtime friend and political ally, Roger Stone:
“Although there are times when political leadership appropriately weighs in on individual prosecutions, it is unheard of for the Department’s top leaders to overrule line prosecutors, who are following established policies, in order to give preferential treatment to a close associate of the President, as Attorney General Barr did in the Stone case. It is even more outrageous for the Attorney General to intervene as he did here — after the President publicly condemned the sentencing recommendation that line prosecutors had already filed in court,” the letter says.
“Such behavior is a grave threat to the fair administration of justice. In this nation, we are all equal before the law.”
Stone was convicted of seven felonies, including lying under oath and obstructing a congressional inquiry, according to a news release by Protect Democracy, an organization founded by former White House and Justice Department lawyers to prevent tactics used around the world by autocrats in the last decade from succeeding here in the U.S.
“The Department’s unprecedented move to give preferential treatment to a close associate of the President smacks of political interference and represents an assault on the rule of law and American values,” according to the news release.
Barr has yet to respond to the letter calling for his resignation. In spite of defending his broad vision of executive power as constitutional, one that permits Trump’s interfere in criminal justice proceedings as legal, he has criticized the president’s more suggestive tweets.
“The essential role of the Attorney General is to keep law enforcement, the criminal process sacrosanct, to make sure there is no political interference in it,” Barr said in an ABC News interview last week, adding that “to have public statements and tweets made about the department, about our people in the department, our men and women here, about cases pending in the department, and about judges before whom we have cases, make it impossible for me to do my job.”
